The Beloved

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  Table of Contents

  The Beloved

  About J. F. Gonzalez

  Also by J. F. Gonzalez

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  THE BELOVED

  PROLOGUE

  THE ESCAPE ROUTE was planned perfectly.

  The first thing he would do was walk through the courtyard to the apartment where his wife’s new lover lived and knock on the door.

  He knew the man was home. He’d seen him pull in to the gated complex in his Lexus. Don Grant had been sitting in his car across the street, watching through a pair of binoculars.

  Lisa’s lover wouldn’t recognize him; of that, he was certain. Don had made the necessary preparations today. He was normally bespectacled, thinning blonde hair neatly trimmed and clean-shaven. He’d worn his contact lenses today instead of his glasses and he hadn’t shaved. His bags were packed and his bank account had been emptied yesterday. He had a Mexican passport, and if he could get over the border this afternoon he could make it down to San Paulo by Saturday. He could lay low for a while, head to Mexico City where a new identity and passport could be bought, then he could wait until his appearance had changed drastically enough for him to drift north again.

  He didn’t want to get caught.

  What the hell am I doing? Don thought as he walked through the apartment complex’s courtyard, hands in the pockets of the light blue windbreaker he was wearing. In the right front pocket of the windbreaker was a cheap .22 pistol he’d bought at a gun store. He’d never fired a gun in his life, and when he’d decided to kill his wife’s lover he’d simply gone into a gun store in Pasadena and picked out the first thing he saw. After the mandatory waiting period and filling out the appropriate paperwork, he’d picked the weapon up along with a box of shells. He wasn’t worried about the weapon being traced back to him. He’d never broken the law before so his fingerprints weren’t on any government computer database. They’d be on the gun, of course, but they’d never find that. If he made it down to the southern tip of Baja he’d throw it in the Pacific.

  What scared him most was the incredible sense of hatred and rage he felt toward Lisa’s lover. And the fact that he was so driven to kill the man.

  Don’s hand trembled in his jacket pocket as he meandered slowly through the courtyard of the apartment complex. It was a Thursday afternoon and the complex was empty. He’d planned well. There’d be no witnesses and he’d be in and out of the complex in less than five minutes.

  But he was still scared to death.

  I’ve never committed a violent act before in my life, Don thought as he scanned apartment numbers on his walk to the rear of the complex. I am a peaceful, God-loving man. I love my wife, I love my country, I love God. I am a man of faith. I believe in the Ten Commandments, especially the one that says Though Shall Not Kill. And I can’t help but want to kill the motherfucker that’s been fucking my wife!

  Yet at the same time he was experiencing these twin feelings of murderous rage and hate he felt perfectly sane.

  Don had tried offering up a small prayer, trying to hear the still small voice of God, trying to ask Him for guidance, to protect him from the strong temptation he was feeling. But he’d felt and heard nothing from God.

  All Don felt was the calm, warm feeling that accompanied the visions he had of watching himself walk into the man’s apartment, seeing his wife there, then opening fire on him, ending his life in a hail of bullets. Whenever he replayed the image, he heard a voice, the same one that gave him such a strong feeling of peace and contentment when he prayed, say to him, you’ll feel better if you kill him, Don. He’s the cause of all your problems. He seduced your wife, and now she doesn’t want to have anything to do with you. She loves him now. Kill him and maybe just maybe—you’ll win her back. You need to prove your strength and show you can’t be taken advantage of. A strong man always takes care of himself. So do it. Kill him.

  Two weeks ago he’d followed Lisa when she left for work. He’d called in sick to his own job at Kaiser Permanente where he worked as a Systems Analyst. He’d followed Lisa discreetly as she drove to Hawthorne, then watched as she’d gone into the apartment complex. He’d gotten out and followed her, staying far enough behind that she never detected she was being followed, but also close enough that he got a general sense of which apartment she had entered.

  He stood before that apartment now.

  Apartment Twenty-Five.

  He stood before the door to apartment Twenty-Five trying to calm the anger and rage that pulsed through him. He’d checked out the man who lived there, found out his name was Bruce Miller, that he drove a black Lexus and had the looks of a typical upper middle-class yuppie fuck. Don had gotten his name from the bank of mailboxes at the front of the apartment, and he’d confirmed his wife was screwing Bruce when he scrolled through her phone list on her cellular one evening when she was in the shower and came across his name. He’d almost gone into the bathroom then to confront her but something had made him stop. She won’t listen, he’d told himself. If I confront her she’ll just deny it. Accuse me of snooping in her personal life and besides, what proof do I really have that she’s fucking around?

  The late night calls to her cellular phone, which she took with a feigned air of casualness, always stealing away into the kitchen or upstairs to take it in hushed whispers; her answers that it was only “her friend Ann or Marge” who had called; the mornings he called her office when he knew she should be there and her secretary informed him that Lisa had an appointment; the evenings she came home late from work, proclaiming that meetings were keeping her in the office till six, seven, sometimes eight or nine o’clock in the evening; the harried expressions, the flush in her cheeks, the slight rumple of her clothes when she came home from such meetings. Oh, she was fucking Bruce Miller all right. The signs were there. And he knew that she’d deny it even if he pointed out all the circumstantial evidence against her.

  Therefore, he had to kill Bruce.

  He’d been agonizing over the decision for weeks. He’d been distraught when his instinct told him Lisa was having an affair. He’d cried, bawled his heart out, actually. His sadness weighed heavily on him the week he’d put everything together and he would have thought Lisa would have sensed his mood; she used to sense the change of his moods so often, and would always inquire if he was okay or if anything was bothering him, but this time she didn’t seem to notice. That made the sadness weigh in more heavily, and it was then the whispering suggestions of murder began. It had quickly grown into a persistent roar.

  And now he was here to follow up on it.

  God help me, Don thought as he wiped a tear from his face. God help me because I can’t help it and I just need to kill this sonofabitch.

  He knocked on the door.

  For a moment there was nothing, then he heard footsteps approach.

  The door flew open.

  A good-looking, tanned and youthful man stood at the door to apartment twenty-five. He grinned. “Yes?”

  “Bruce Miller?”

  “Yeah?”

  Don heard a voice in the background. He instantly recognized it as Lisa’s.

  He barreled past Bruce into the sparsely furnished living room, shoving the other man roughly against the door. He pulled the .22 out of his jacket pocket and pointed it at Lisa as she emerged from the back bedroom, gasping in surprise. She was dressed in the skirt she had worn this morning when she’d left for work, a red satin bra, and her black pumps. Now her black hair hung in her face in disarray and Don noticed with rising anger that Don’s shirt was unbuttoned, showing off a tanned, washboard chest. The zipper of his slacks was down, too. “I knew it,” Don muttered, pointing the gun at Lisa, fighting back the tears. “I fucking knew it!” />
  “Don, please put the gun down!” Lisa said, and there was something in her tone of voice that got to him. He gasped, steeling himself from the image of what he wanted to do: plug holes into both of their adulterous faces, but especially hers. The urge to empty the chamber of his newly purchased .22 was so strong it washed over him, seeming to whisper, do it now, do it now now nownownownownow!

  “Don’t do anything foolish, Don,” Bruce said, seeming to take the confrontation in stride. He made no effort to close the door or take a defensive stance.

  Don couldn’t think straight. He glared at both of them, alternating aiming the .22 from one lover to the other, as if unsure of which one to shoot. Lisa looked frantic, scared, but not guilty. No, not guilty at all.

  “Why?” he asked her, gun aimed at her lover.

  Tears streamed down Lisa’s face. “Please don’t shoot him, Don. Please!”

  “What if I do?”

  “Please don’t,” Lisa begged, and there was something in her voice, something that seemed so desperate, so hungry, that it spoke to him. “Please don’t kill him. I don’t think that...”

  Don’t think that what, Lisa? Don thought, suddenly finding the power he held over Lisa’s emotions now...well, kind of exciting. He hadn’t been able to so much as arouse any kind of emotion in her lately, and here he was inspiring fear. It gave him a feeling of confidence. He kept the gun trained on Bruce, who stood at the open doorway calmly, as if he were used to the spectacle of jealous husbands.

  “Please!” Lisa sank to the floor on her knees and sobbed. “Please you can’t kill him...he’s...he’s all I’ve got!”

  And hearing her sob like that, recognizing the tone of her sadness for what it was, brought the anger and hate rushing back to Don Grant once again. Lisa was deeply in love with Bruce Miller; he could tell by the gut-wrenching sobs, so heavy with emotion. This wasn’t just an affair of the flesh, something that could be forgiven and worked through with marriage counseling and a lot of love. This was betrayal of the deepest sort. She had given not only her body, but also her heart and soul to another man.

  And she had ripped his out in the process.

  And that hurt more than anything.

  But it also made him angry and hate-filled until it burst out of him in a sudden fury.

  Don squeezed the trigger, emptying all six shells into Bruce Miller, who staggered and fell back against the open door, the jamb of the door stopping him from tumbling to the Pergo entranceway. Lisa let out a long wail. “Noooo!”

  Don turned back to Lisa one last time; he wanted the image of her crying visage to be burned into his mind forever. He wanted to savor the moment of when he had killed her lover.

  He turned and stepped toward the doorway to make his retreat when he stopped suddenly, amazement and confused fear vying for equal attention in his already jumbled emotions.

  Bruce Miller was rising to his feet, grinning. Don saw the six wounds the .22 shells had rent into his body where he’d shot him, but as he watched Bruce get to his feet with a rising sense of alarm he saw them close up, expelling the shells. The sound of the spent lead hitting the floor made the reality of it more final, and as Don stood there rooted to the spot, staring at Bruce with a sense of numb awe, he noticed Bruce wasn’t finished.

  He was still changing.

  Don heard a dull thump as the gun fell from his limp hand.

  Bruce Miller laughed; his mouth became a twisted thing, filled with rows of rotten, jagged teeth. His eyes were burning orbs set in a skull that was bony. As he laughed, Don smelled the sourness of his breath. He watched in growing horror and cold, blind fear as Bruce’s body morphed and contorted into a shapeless thing, and then a grinning leering wraith of indeterminate sex.

  He heard Lisa behind him give a gasp—not of fright, but of surprised joy. “Bruce!” She ran past Don and embraced the still morphing thing, hugging it, laughing with joy. “Bruce! Bruce!”

  Bruce looked at Don over Lisa’s shoulder as he hugged her. His hair had grown and thickened, becoming tangled dreadlocks. His skin had become bruised-colored, almost a sickly green. He licked his lips with a tongue that looked diseased.

  Lisa grasped the Bruce-thing’s face between her hands and kissed him deeply. Don’s stomach plunged down an elevator shaft as he watched the Bruce-thing’s tongue undulating in Lisa’s mouth.

  The sound of his screams snapped him out of his frozen shock and he bolted out of the apartment.

  He didn’t know how he made it past them without flinching in revulsion and dread, but he managed. Instinct will do that; kind of like the way an arachnophobia will stand frozen in fear when a spider scuttles down its web ten feet away from him, but if a life or death situation threatens his life he’ll blunder through the web without a second thought of the spider becoming entangled in his hair or clothes. That was how Don made it past the Bruce-thing and his wife—he just bolted past them, screaming at the top of his lungs, and ran through the courtyard, his sense of self-preservation compelling him to flee.

  He took the stairs leading down to the sidewalk at the front of the complex three at a time, ran across the street without checking for traffic, almost got hit by a Federal Express van that honked at him, and fumbled for the driver’s side door of his car. He opened it and dove in, started the engine and peeled away from the curb, his terror racing through his heart, and it wasn’t until he was a mile away he realized he was doing sixty in a thirty-five mile an hour zone and slowed down.

  Back at the apartment complex, Lisa Grant stepped out of the apartment with a very normal-looking Bruce Miller. The two lovers had put their clothes on and their features showed concern as they looked toward the front of the complex where Don had fled. An older man stepped out of his apartment across the courtyard and looked around. “What was that man yelling about?” the old man asked.

  “He was upset,” Lisa said, not wanting to get into it further. “He’ll be fine.”

  A woman from two doors down also stepped out. “Everything okay?” she asked. “I thought I heard gunshots.”

  Bruce nodded and smiled. He’d buttoned his shirt and zipped up his slacks. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Was somebody shooting a gun?”

  “No,” Bruce said, turning to her, shrugging. “I don’t know what that was.”

  “Hmmm.” The woman nodded, lips pursed. She appeared to dismiss the sound of the gunshots. “That man sounded like he was mad.”

  “He is,” Lisa said, frowning. “It’s really very sad. He’s been this way for a while.”

  “Oh,” the woman said, looking embarrassed. She looked too young to be playing hooky from school and too old to be retired. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “He really should get some help,” Bruce said, mostly to Lisa. The woman two doors down went back into her apartment. “It’s getting worse. He could have killed us.”

  “That doesn’t matter now,” Lisa said, her face flush. She was practically swooning. “What matters is us.” She took his hand, pulling him back into the apartment. “Come on and finish what you started.”

  Bruce grinned. “As you wish.”

  They went back into the apartment and closed the door behind them.

  PART ONE

  Beginnings

  ONE

  “ELIZABETH?”

  She barely heard Gregg’s voice call out her name. She was knee deep in the latest novel, on a nice narrative flow, when the sound of his voice jarred her out of that waking dream state she got into whenever she became absorbed in her work. Not wanting to break the flow, she focused on the scene in her head, especially the sentence and line of dialogue she was working on. Chuck turned to Wanda, not knowing what to do or say. She looked back at him, eyes red from crying, the blood from the wound in her scalp already starting to clot. She was opening her mouth to say something when the door crashed open behind them and a large shape filled the entranceway, the stink of Alfred’s body and the presence of his hulking—

 
; “Elizabeth!”

  Her concentration broken, she turned. Gregg was standing at the doorway to her office dressed in a pair of pajama shorts and nothing else, a dissatisfied look on his face. “Can’t you hear me? I’ve been calling you for fifteen minutes.”

  “Fifteen minutes? Gregg, you’ve got to be kidding, you just called me and— ”

  “No, Elizabeth, I’ve been calling you for the past fifteen minutes and you aren’t answering. Really, I think you need to have your hearing checked or something.” Elizabeth scowled. Gregg had that holier-than-thou look he got whenever he was on one of his power trips, which was all the time lately. Whenever he brought up the subject of her hearing it was always in relation to her not hearing him when he called for her when she was in her office writing. He knew the hearing thing was bullshit, but he did it to drive the knife in a little deeper. If she wouldn’t spend so much time in her office writing, she’d have more time to spend with him. But because she wrote, devoted her time to this extra-marital lover, the green monster of jealousy erupted from Gregg the way zits popped up on an adolescent’s face. It was his way of saying, pay attention to me!

  She bit her tongue, not wanting to fly off at the handle with the first thing that came to her mind, which was, it’s not my fault you’re not pursuing your muse with so many theatre groups in Lancaster, so why don’t you kindly fuck off? That would lead to a fight. And a fight was something they couldn’t have. Not now, not so late at night, and not with Eric asleep down the hall in his room.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you,” she said in a mechanical voice, words she said at least once every few weeks whether she wanted to or not. “What is it?”

  “I just wish you would listen to me more,” he said. “You never listen to me.”

  Oh God, not again. “I’m listening, Gregg,” she said instead, trying to sound interested. “What?”

  “Forget it,” he turned and retreated back down the hall.